More News from The Transcontinental Race!

Women's circumnavigation world record holder Juliana Buhring en route in the TCR.
Kristof Allegaert continues to force the pace in the Transcontinental Race this week. He has already reached Bulgaria, exceeding most of the mileage-time predictions made in advance of the start, while WCR Grand Tour veteran Richard Dunnett is doggedly trailing him through Serbia in second place.
The field of racers riding unsupported since last Saturday from London to Istanbul has been unmercifully strung out across the European continent, as you'll see from the satellite tracking page which can be reached by clicking on "unmercifully strung out ".
A storm-soaked Stelvio Pass caught many riders by surprise midweek, causing several to rethink their approach plans. Throw on the rain gear? Sit/sleep it out down the bottom? Go around the other side and see if the weather's better there? Most of them wisely took a mix of the first two options.
The Stelvio Pass checkpoint has now been officially shut, and any competitors who haven't made it there yet will be punished with an asterisk beside their names on the Final Standings list should they still manage to reach Turkey.
At any rate, the group Twitter page has been providing plenty of useful insight into the dilemmas, trials and joys of solo long distance competitive cycling.
Subjects such as toothache, passport-forgetting, obscure-replacement-spoke locating, property investment, and beer bottle dimensions have been eloquently touched upon in an engrossing collection of 140-character-long-or-less sentences from the saddle, all of them proof that travel really does broaden the mind.
Add to this the fact that the organizers have their own series of in-depth race reports on the official Trancontinental page, and there's no reason why anybody curious about our riders' ongoing progress towards Istanbul should feel out of the loop.